classroom management

I recently had the opportunity to read Don't Swear with Your Mouth Full by Cary S. Chugh, Ph. D and child psychologist.  His book introduces behavior-limited discipline, which he explains below.  Before you even read his book, you should be able to walk away with the basic idea that children should not be given "punishments" which allow to continue anti-social behavior, though cool-off time may be needed.  But instead, they need to practice pro-social behaviors.  This discipline, like Chugh's book, is very accessible to both parents and teachers. He discusses "difficult" children as making up about 10% of children.  More importantly, he explains that these children often aren't "difficult" due to their parents poor parenting, but rather the child's temperament and desire for control.

Lucy Calkins and the teacher's college reading and writing project folks recommend letting students use pens.  To me, this makes sense for many reasons: at the primary grades because kids like using pens since we normally make them use pencils; for classroom management and those students who like to avoid working (or just push too hard on their pencils) using a pen eliminates the time waster of sharpening pencils and allows me to worry about planning and prepping that doesn't involve managing the pencil sharpening job or worse sharpening pencils myself.

But I just read a better researched-based reason: THEY WILL WRITE MORE WITH PENS!!!!